The New Yorker Investigates

Today, The New Yorker is announcing Strongbox, an online tool that allows you to send messages or documents to our writers and editors anonymously. (Kevin Poulsen, who helped build Strongbox together with the late Aaron Swartz, explains it all in this blog post.) The New Yorker has a long tradition of excellence in investigative reporting; many of the fifty-six National Magazine Awards we’ve won since 1970 have honored investigative pieces, like Daniel Lang’s “Casualties of War” (1970) and Seymour Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib” (2005). With Strongbox, we hope to broaden and extend that tradition by making ourselves more easily available to sources around the world.

Writing an investigative story requires a wide network of sources and information. To a large degree, that network is something a reporter can build herself. But the process can work the other way, too: readers and members of the public can reach out to share what they know. An investigative story is woven out of information gathered in all sorts of ways: through interviews, reading, and firsthand reporting; from tips, documents, and the painstaking process of fact-checking. When it all comes together, a complex, amorphous, and elusive subject can be made focussed and factual.

Often, in The New Yorker, someone’s previously untold experiences help us understand a larger story, and documents—sourced, for example, from individuals or archives, or through the Freedom of Information Act—make the abstract specific. Jane Mayer’s “The Memo,” from 2006, follows Alberto J. Mora, the general counsel for the United States Navy, as he reads, in a series of legal memos, about the Bush Administration’s evolving views on torture; alarmed, he writes a twenty-two-page memo of his own, laying out the legal case against it. The memos themselves tell a complex and ironic story: the trail of legal documents chronicles, in detail, the weakening of the rule of law. In Ryan Lizza’s “The Obama Memos,” from 2012, internal White House memos are used to make a gradual and unacknowledged shift in the President’s outlook more visible. Memos from early in Obama’s first term show an optimistic President who’s excited about “post-partisan” deal-making; later memos, in contrast, show Obama “making the unpleasant choices of governing in a system defined by its constraints.”

In other pieces, a large archive of documents is used alongside a number of stories told by individuals. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Operation Delirium,” from 2012, is about the U.S. Army’s chemical-weapons-testing programs, and is based around a huge archive of documents—not just memos and reports but also raw scientific data and even film footage. The archive materials document more than a decade of experimentation, much of it on American soldiers who weren’t told about the dangers of the trials in which they’d be participating. Khatchadourian sifts through the material and tracks down several of the test subjects; from a chaos of information, a story emerges. (The New Yorker has put many of those documents online in a feature called “Secrets of Edgewood.”) And, in other stories, documents themselves have a starring role. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s “State Secrets,” from 2008, classified documents containing information gathered through the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program are accidentally released by the Treasury Department; they’re sent to a lawyer, Lynne Bernabei, who represents the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, one of the organizations that has been wiretapped. The Foundation uses the documents to challenge, in court, the constitutionality of the program, and Keefe describes the outcome of that challenge.

These articles, meanwhile, represent only a small part of The New Yorker’s investigative work. Looking back through our archive of investigative articles, what’s striking is its diversity. The magazine has published articles on violence in El Salvador (Mark Danner’s “The Truth of El Mozote”) and organized crime in Rio de Janeiro (Jon Lee Anderson’s “Gangland”); on the complexities and inequalities of the mental-health system (Susan Sheehan’s “The Patient”) and on pollution in the Hudson (Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The River”); about the My Lai massacre (Seymour Hersh’s “The Investigations of Son My”), a bribery scandal in Afghanistan (Dexter Filkins’s “The Afghan Bank Heist”), and the dangers of nuclear terrorism (Steve Coll’s “The Unthinkable”). Philip Gourevitch has written about the fax that warned the United Nations about the impending genocide in Rwanda (“The Genocide Fax”). Connie Bruck has chronicled massive corporate mergers (“Deal of the Year”); Lawrence Wright has investigated the Church of Scientology (“The Apostate”); George Packer has explored attempts to prosecute Wall Street crime (“A Dirty Business”). Often, the interests of individual writers span tremendous distances. David Grann has written not only about a possibly unjust execution in Texas (“Trial by Fire”), but also about an assassination plot in Guatemala (“A Murder Foretold”). Sarah Stillman has written about the lives of foreign workers on U.S. military bases (“The Invisible Army”), and also about the dangers faced by drug informants who work with law enforcement (“The Throwaways”).

These pieces testify to the collaborative nature of investigative reporting. In the movies, you’ll often see a lone reporter chasing a story, but investigative stories are essentially participatory; it can take a whole cast of people to transform the vague and uncertain into the concrete and knowable. Strongbox is a new way for the public to participate in that effort.

Joshua Rothman is the magazine’s Archive Editor.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.